How to Take Your Joomla! Website Temporarily Offline

There may be occasions when you will make your Joomla! website completely unavailable to visitors for a short time. There is a simple switch in the Administrator back-end that enables you to take your website offline very quickly. It can be returned to service at a later time just as easily.

To make your Joomla! website unavailable to visitors, replacing it with a simple message, do this:

Log in to the Administrator back-end.

Click on the Global Configuration button in the main Control Panel or System → Global Configuration in Joomla 3.x.

There are so many configuration options that they need to be divided into separate groups or tabs. The Site tab, it should be the default first view displayed, if not click on the tab.

Find where it says Site Offline and click the Yes button in Joomla 3.x.